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A Footboy is Not So Lowly as He Sounds

In my innocence, I think the house mine. That fine stone house, with its slow-ticking parlour clock and its grand walnut table. For am I not Mrs Read’s grandson? Am I not her only heir? The old woman did not consider she might be about to get into bed for eternity. Though she had thought us muddy sorts, my Ma fit only for scrubbing, and me too much my mother’s son, in her last weeks she had come to calling me dearest, to pinching my cheek and ruffling my hair. In short, she had changed her mind, but not her will.

Shortly before the funeral, distant cousins arrive from Northumberland. There are pests in the house, they say, and might I vacate the premises while it is cleaned? Young as I am, I understand them.

So along with my clothes, I take one tiny book from Captain Read’s library that will hardly be missed, about the West Indies, which is where I place you, brother, because it is so much more heartening to imagine than your skeleton clattering about the pebbles on the seabed of the English Channel. The day after I move out, my mother meets with a solicitor in his offices, who makes it plain to us that her late husband, and therefore her son — he says this so markedly that I wonder whether he really believes the word — were, and are, disinherited.

How quickly money runs away, when needed. Soon we are reduced to stale ha’penny loaves and the cheapest tallow candles. Ma says there is nothing for it but to go into service. Not her, because she is sure she doesn’t have the temperament for it, but I am young, which they will take to mean biddable, and grand folk prefer the more affordable wage that youth allows. I am to ‘live in’, she says. She has her own plan for herself, she says. What plan, she says not, but I know she will not be returning to needle and thread, on account of her eyes and fingers. I am to help her out until she is on her feet again.

Mrs Fredericks has often mentioned which big house is hiring (always with an opinion) and is not unhappy to receive me on her doorstep and offer advice. Poor thing, she says, cooing me in, giving me a biscuit. It’s a shame, she says, that some people have no morals when it comes to money, because these people were not so quick to come to the house when the old lady was alive, but being in service is a respectable calling, and boys from good families do well in livery. She tells me that an unmarried French lady in Mayfair, name of Demoiselle de Vaucresson, is looking for a footboy, her last having run away to join the army. This being the war that may be about to begin any day now between England and France, and all manner of other countries, which is exciting footboys all over London, who fancy themselves for soldiers, thinking they might come back from war with a scar to impress the ladies, and a full belly on the King’s provisions, and a fat purse, and perhaps a medal or two. And maybe some part of themselves lopped off, although she does not suppose they are imagining that. The Grand Alliance has been reformed, armies all over Europe are recruiting young men, and it will not take very much to set them all at each other’s throats, for the fun of it as much as anything, but I mustn’t think of joining them. I asked after Adisa and she says Charles? Charles has been dismissed for taking off a glove. She herself is only there by the grace of God.

Footboys earn two shillings a week. My duties are all sorts of things that are not meet for women and too lowly for butlers, but I am given a fine blue coat for greeting guests in, or serving at table, and another for everyday wear, the whole uniform including undergarments, as Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not like her servants to be tatty on any level, including those levels she cannot see. I am given the room that I was jokingly promised only a few weeks ago by Adisa, an attic room with a chimney running through it, which at the time I take up the position is unbearably hot, being as it is June and there being only the smallest window in the gable end, and the cook, who is known throughout the household only as Cook, is given to cooking from dawn until dusk, preparing not only meals but all kinds of fancy pastries, meaning that the chimney barely cools down before it is heated up again.

Nevertheless I am glad to have a roof over my head, and a bed of my own, since I am getting too large to share with my mother. Though I had so recently had a much wider bed with a counterpane with burning birds embroidered upon it, which meant something to Mrs Read, in the between times I have been shoved up with my mother again, in lodgings that are crawling black on their inside walls and home to all manner of insects. Thus, I am glad to havw something dry and warm (even if somewhat too warm) that houses, besides myself, only a few spiders.

The butler of the household is a Mister Thomas, who is a man born in the marshes. He has a thick accent and a crude laugh, though he squashes it all when he is butlering. Even though Demoiselle de Vaucresson has more than once caught him in his real voice, she is too French to notice the difference between the two Mister Thomases, only noting that one of them she can easily translate and the other one makes her question the functioning of her ears. Mister Thomas is the only person that Cook will recognise as being above her. By her reckoning she is above everyone else, including all other Cooks, and secretly including Demoiselle de Vaucresson, who after all by Cook’s tongue is one of the Filthy French, and not to be thought superior just because she has a deep purse.

Cook is a mean woman, given to lashing out with a wooden spoon as I go by. The minute she learned I was the late Mrs Read’s grandson she began calling me Lord and Master, as though Lords and Masters get sent out into the road to collect horse dung for the herb garden, or are made to scrub pans until their hands go the colour of peonies. Only on the second week do I understand from Mister Thomas that these are not my duties at all, and that I am something like an under-butler, who must sometimes move furniture for Kate to clean behind, and sometimes carry things too heavy for Cook, but am not what Mister Thomas calls a General Dogsbody. When I’m fully grown I will be a Footman, and that is no inconsiderable thing. As a footboy I must run messages, and assist Mister Thomas to serve meals, and I must accompany my mistress’s coach when she is visiting. On all occasions I may accept vails, which are coins pressed into my hand by Demoiselle de Vaucresson’s wealthy friends, and these alone have tripled my wages.

Nevertheless Cook continues to try it on. She takes special delight in giving me jobs that take me down into the cellar, because she knows it is full of rats. It is not only me she is mean to. She calls the housemaid, whose name is Kate, Miss Mustard, which leaden words (though I don’t understand them) have the effect of casting Kate’s eyes to the floor. She likes very much to talk about people’s body parts, so long as she is certain there will be no penalty. She would never dare say that Demoiselle de Vaucresson, whom she calls The Lady of the House, has a scraggy little arse (which she says to Kate), or any kind of arse at all. She would never comment on a gentleman’s legs but she is happy to comment on mine. She has tried more than once to pull my pizzle (as she likes to put it), but each time I dodge out of her way and she laughs. When she has put supper in the oven, she sits by the range on a three-legged stool, brings out a pouch of tobacco and a pipe from her skirts, holds a lit taper to the end and sucks, making big smacking noises with her froggy lips. She says it is good for her lungs. One time she blows smoke in my face as I go past and I see her on her deathbed, the sheets grey with yellow stains, and Cook coughing blood into a flannel and crying for the daughter she had who died as a baby. The vision so arrests me that I stop dead in front of her, and I suppose I must be looking at her strangely, for she startles and says ‘Get away from me now!’

Demoiselle de Vaucresson does not know me to be the grandchild of Mrs Read, since my mother told me to say nothing. Not because she knows it to be a lie — she has spread the tale so widely in London that I suspect she now believes it herself — but because she feared the Demoiselle, armed with this knowledge, would be unlikely to hire me for the reason that I might be ‘above myself’, though it is surely as impossible for me to be ‘above myself’ as it is for me to be on two floors of the house at once. But though Demoiselle de Vaucresson is ignorant of my thwarted prospects, Cook knows, because Mrs Fredericks told her. Cook is delighted to know, and in playful moods refers to me as Master Less, so that one time Kate said ‘Master Less?’ she said ‘Master Less-Than-He-Was!’ followed by a cackle of laughter.

Ma calls at the kitchen door every Saturday for my wages. I wonder when she will ever get back on her feet. Or whether she has, since her clothes are getting fancier. Silk bodices can’t be had from a footboy’s wages, and no-one can dress like a lady on six pounds a year. But I know she is resourceful.

I say as much to Mister Thomas, and tell him about sleeping under the gentleman’s bed in Exeter when I was a child, and he roars himself hoarse with laughter and says, yes indeed, those gentlemen’s beds can be very bouncy, yes indeed, and I feel heat come to my cheeks even though I am not at all sure what he thinks is so funny. When I say he must have been a very kind gentleman, because he gave my mother three sovereigns, Mister Thomas says he must have been a very sorry gentleman, to wake up and find himself so light in the purse, because that wasn’t at all what you would pay for a cuddle with a woman you met in a hostelry. That is when I understand him. I tell Mister Thomas that my mother is not a whore, and his smile collapses into something more serious and he says of course not, she is a woman without recourse, which makes me hope he thinks better of her. But the next time she calls, I compare her clothes to the clothes of the women that walk up and down Marybone with nowhere to go.

Whatever Ma is doing to put herself in fine dresses, she is doing it very well. When she sees me now, she pats me on the head, as though I am an animal she is very fond of, but she does not ask me how I am keeping, or whether I like running messages and serving pastries so that she can take away my earnings to put a feather in her hat.

Then I get a fleabite. Fleabite, I am sure it is, except for it stays, making a great lump of itself. Then another comes up on the other side to match it. Now I know these are not fleabites at all, but the end of my being a footboy unless I am careful. Until this time it has been easy to be a boy. Never do I empty myself in a public place. Never am I bathed by anyone but myself, so it’s simple enough to conceal what isn’t there. In looks I have always been enough like a boy to be mistaken for one, and in manner I have learned to adopt more fully the spirit of the name I go by. You, I think, wouldn’t cower in the attic and wait to be called: you would be dressed and downstairs as soon as you were woken, seeing who was about, and what, if anything, you could pilfer. And you, I think, would not accept that Cook could smack you on the legs with a wooden spoon as you passed, but would, for revenge, toy with her condiments, and put a little mustard powder in her morning restorative, not so much to make her sick, but enough to ensure that it never tasted right on any day she had made free with her utensils. You wouldn’t think twice about stealing a plum from the table when Cook was in the larder getting flour to make a pie, and popping it straight into your mouth, and using only nods and shakes of the head until you could slip out of the room and birth it from your mouth like a hairless purple puppy, and bite into it with relish for the sheer taste of liberty.

Living the name that everyone calls me has made it easy to have a boy’s ways, a boy’s wiles, a boy’s boldness with things that don’t belong to him. So when those two fleabites that aren’t fleabites come calling a chill runs through me that could freeze the great wide bounty of the Thames. I flatten the bumps with my hands, but can hardly walk around all day holding on to myself like a woman caught bathing. I have no wish to be discovered.

Fortunately my uniform includes a waistcoat. I note by experiment that the fabric is so firm that my bumps are perfectly flattened when the waistcoat is buttoned. I only hope I will not grow so bosomy that it will not disguise me. The simple reason being this. The more I see of the relative freedoms of girls and boys, of women and men, the more I knew I must turn from boy to man, and be a man all of my days.

For example. Only girls and women have babies, and by all accounts that is a fearsome thing, worse than getting a lead bullet shot into your belly by a musket, worse than being entirely run over by a dray cart, and in the same manner, as often as not, fatal. But all women must bear it, because thousands of years ago a woman bit into an apple. Why Eve’s sin should be visited on all of us I do not know, and it makes as good a reason as any to go to church with my ears blocked with lint. I have heard from the men that sometimes visit Kate and smoke outside the back door when I am chopping kindling that having babies, and the thing that leads to having babies, is all that women are good for. As a rule girls are not trained in a trade, or in writing (to be clerks), or in investing (to be bankers), because all that matters about them are their body parts, and especially their womb, and how many children it will make their husband. Easily one time in ten, having a baby will make you die, which is a sorry end to a sorry beginning. So many men have three or four wives because they have killed the first two or three by putting a baby in them.

Second example. As noted before, men make the world. They make all the things in the world that have use and will last, and the women, if they make anything at all, make things of no consequence. Every utensil I use, every chair that I sit on, every carriage in the streets, every sword, every ship, every house, every castle, was made by men. Women make food, which is digested into dung. They make clothes, which are worn into rags. Higher class women embroider pointless patterns on cushions — see Mrs Read and her crocuses — or worse, they make ‘samplers’ which demonstrate various stitches to no great purpose, since they will never be employed as a seamstress. No wonder men consider women to be useless except in the matter of making babies. Babies is the one thing women make that lasts for a lifetime (though some babies’ lifetimes are short), and have some utility in the world, if they are boy babies — but this is nothing due to the prowess of women, since the ability is natural and not in their control. Female dogs and rats and spiders are as good as spawning young as women are, better, mostly, because (I think) they do not so often die of it. Where everything that men make sets them apart from the animals, the one lasting thing made by women puts us squarely among them.

Third example. Men may have adventures. A man who has adventures, no matter what their nature, is a hero. If any woman dares to have an adventure, even so small an adventure as an unaccompanied excursion to the wrong part of the city, she is deemed either a ‘fallen woman’ or a disgrace, whose adventure must never be mentioned. If her adventure involves consorting with a man to whom she isn’t married, so much the worse. Whereas a man may sail across the ocean, may murder people in the name of his country, may steal gold in the name of his queen, and he will be called a hero, and may be given a medal, a knighthood, or a seat in the parliament making laws to his own advantage. A man’s smallest adventure will be celebrated in a tavern, enlarged upon and told a dozen times, and no-one will think any worse of him for doing so. A woman’s largest adventure must be kept under her tongue, and sit there like a sugared almond she fears to suck upon. It seems that shopping is as much of an adventure as a good woman will admit to herself, or to polite company. Mrs Read called going to her milliner’s ‘an expedition’.

For all these reasons, I am determined to keep the advantage of being male. Even if it is not so much advantage as I would have being the son of a vicar, or a clerk, or a gentleman, it is far more advantage than the daughter of any of those, to find I can move freely around the world, and make my mark upon it in some lasting fashion. And not to be thought less than anyone of my size and upbringing, or to be considered simple in the head, or weak in the arms, for the lack of some extra flesh between the legs. For this reason I will swallow the small restriction of wearing a waistcoat, regardless of the weather, to make my chest look more like Adam’s and less like Eve’s.

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Unregulated Emotion is as Deadly as the Pox

Calamity arrives on Mrs Read’s doorstep in the shape of a man. By the state of him, vomited out by the sea. Such a rotten-looking man. Hair like a mop for ashes, and beard tatty as a rook’s nest, and half an arm gnawed off by something only half hungry. How it might have chewed through to his bone I cannot imagine, as his skin has the brown toughness of a pair of boots. His uneaten arm ends in tree root fingers gnarled around a cup of brandy. A cup, I note, and not one of Mrs Read’s fancy glasses, but a cup from the kitchen which I’m guessing Charles knew to be the right container from the barely detectable wideness of Mrs Read’s eyelid or from a tightness in her upper lip, which Charles well knows how to read as a silent instruction in matters of household deportment. I arrive to survey the scene through the crack of the door as Charles finishes pouring the liquid into that cup, with the man thanking him in a voice unnaturally loud, saying he had the shakes very bad and couldn’t do without it and that a whole succession of ships’ doctors had prescribed him brandy though he had generally only been able to find rum. He really does look like something about him is going off, and has a smell about him too, the way fish does when it’s been in the sun a few hours. Plenty of sailors came in and out of the harbour at Broxholme, and some of them were worn at the edges, if we were their first stop after a long voyage. But never have I seen any like this one. His trousers are half a pair of brown moleskins and half a pair of green pantaloons, though I can’t be sure he has chosen the better leg of each, since the moleskins have a hole at the knee, and the pantaloons, as I notice when he turns his cup hand to Charles, have a tear across the situpon.

Ten minutes earlier: Mister Rotard standing by the steps and a strange noise leaking through the window of the front parlour. Mister Rotard suggests with his eyes that we take the basement steps. We enter into the kitchen to find Mrs Fredericks standing dead still, floury hands crab-crouched on the edge of the table like Lady Upton about to play the harpsichord, and eyes raised to the ceiling to aid her ears. Seeing myself and Mister Rotard enter, she jolts into action, washes her hands at the tap, dries them on a cloth, and tells us to wait, heading upstairs towards the source of the noise. Mister Rotard does as he is told, sitting himself down at the kitchen table. I stay on my feet, obeying the same command for as long as five minutes, but finally am too curious to wait, and dodge his attempt to snatch my wrist, and head towards the noise.

The source of the noise is plainly Mrs Read. From the view afforded by the hinge-gap of the half-open door, she is prostrate on her long couch, half buried under a crooked arm and three of her cushions, making a sound like the wind through a crack in the world. The half-armed man drinking brandy out of a kitchen cup has brought her some great sorrow.

Mrs Fredericks has had the whole situation from Charles, who has several times gone in and out. She whispers what she knows. The sailor handed Mrs Read a letter written by your father several months ago. He served on Captain Read’s ship, and now he is finally returned to London with the letter he has come to deliver for the promise — for the letter offers this promise — that he will be rewarded for delivering the news. Mrs Read is in floods all over her cushions, weeping like she been hoarding her sobs for the day when they might be needed and now has the whole larder of tears to get rid of as quickly as possible, before they moulder away. But the reward has not yet surfaced, or the sailor would not be standing there waiting for the storm to subside, and a purse to rise out of it.

Had Mrs Read not been in spate she would have shouted him off her carpet, because even now one of his shoes (the one boasting a strange white toe peeking out of it like a mouse from a skirting board) is trespassing upon the Not To Be Trodden Upon, as though his feet long for something soft to nestle in, after so many months on the hard boards of a ship’s deck. Since she doesn’t look at him, I look on him very hard, reckoning him up: what looks to be a stolen Spanish jacket (a knife slit in its side), a squat veiny neck with the black smudge of a tattoo peeking out from his shirt. His lips scarfed white at the edges. He has the gulping habit of one who prefers his spirits by the tankard.

Too late, I am reminded of Mister Lampard’s words about deer. Not ‘what gentlemen may hunt, common men must poach,’ but how you must shoot your prey quickly, before they feel your eyes on their flank, and flee. I have looked at this sailor too hunter-like. He turns his head and his eyes look right at mine, or at least, at the crack, where he senses mine to be.

‘Come in!’ he says, though it is not his place to invite me into Mrs Read’s parlour, which is surely more mine than his. But I do not think to disobey him. Mrs Fredericks is vanished back down the stairs like a mouse meowed at, but I want to see him better. So in I go. But only a few inches, in case I need to get out. Charles is standing close by, his dark eyes on me like a weight.

The sailor says, ‘You are John’s son?’ (Correcting himself) ‘Captain Read’s son? I detect a likeness.’

This cannot be possible but people see what suits them.

‘And who are you?’ I ask, as boldly as if I am John son’s, and more boldly than I would dare were Mrs Read not wailing into her cushions.

‘Only a poor sailor,’ he says, ‘and not one you need ask after. Only come to deliver a letter from your father to your grandmother.’

At the mention of a letter, Mrs Read’s wail rises higher, the sailor takes a gulp of his brandy, and I now see the letter like a handkerchief on the floor. I say,

‘My father has been at sea so long that I have never known more of him than his name. The least I can ask of you is that you give me your own.’

The boldness in my voice is yours. I am as surprised by it as anyone. The sound coming out of Mrs Read drops a little.

‘Ezekiel Broom,’ he says, taking a gulp of brandy to wash down the awkwardness of those hard and soft sounds together.

Now I own his name like a woodsman owns the handle of his axe, and when he sees me staring at the sorry state of his clothes he apologises, saying he has been stranded for some time on an island in the Azores and has not taken the chance to repair himself, but rather came directly to deliver the message to Mrs Read so that he might have the means to repair himself. Which I understand, as we all do, to be a request for money.

‘Is my father returning?’ I ask.

A new noise from the sofa.

‘No, Master Read,’ says Ezekiel Broom. ‘He was carried off by the ague.’

‘And that’s not the worst of it,’ wails Mrs Read. ‘He lost his Letter of Marque! He lost his Letter of Marque!’

Why her son losing a letter is worse than his being carried off, which I know to mean dying, by the ague, by all accounts a fearsome disease, is a mystery to me. But it seems I am the only person in the entire household able to close this terrible business. Adisa and Mrs Fredericks, being servants, can do nothing unless instructed, and she who might instruct them can do nothing in this moment but water every flower on her cushions. I snatch up the letter and read the promised reward. Then take a careful diversion around the Not-to-be-Trodden-Upon, kneel, pick up Mrs Read’s damp hand, and squeeze it tightly, whispering my question in her ear.

‘In the armoire,’ she says weakly. ‘In a hatbox in the armoire.’

Not an ordinary opening, the opening of that hatbox. So many promissory notes in their denominations. So many coins. So much gold! I kneel before that hatbox as though it is a reliquary. Tears come like good friends to a funeral. I do not imagine I will ever get to my feet again. But then the thin smoke of wailing reaches me. Taking what is needed, I shut it all away. I will not think on it again, I tell myself, already knowing how it will itch me at night, the thought of such bounty so close, and how I might put handfuls in my pockets and walk out into the chill dark were it not for law and the threat of sisal around my throat.

Five golden sovereigns it costs to be rid of Ezekial Broom, and once he is gone, Mrs Fredericks and I help the stricken woman to her bed. I do not imagine Mister Rotard will be instructing me after all this, but he is entirely stuck on it. Presumably he is concerned his own paltry shilling might not be honoured if he abandons his duty, though the morning has been perfectly educational in its own way: how paralysed he was, and everyone else bar me, when there was action to be taken. He does not stir from the kitchen throughout the noise, and when he presumably hears the door open and close and sees the mismatched trouser legs of Ezekial Broom roil past the half-window, and he comes up to start our lesson, as he likes to call it, the one area of ignorance that I am troubled by, concerning the Letter of Marque, he waves away as being something that need not concern me.

Only later, in the kitchen, am I enlightened. Mrs Fredericks catches me reaching for a pinch of broken pie crust behind her back and says, ’You’ll be just like your father, then. A blooming pirate.’ A Letter of Marque, Adisa explains, is the piece of paper whose thickness measures the difference between gentleman and rogue. With this letter, authorised with the King’s signature and seal, a captain may call themselves a privateer, which is to say, a private adventurer licensed to capture and rob the ships of our enemies, which in any given year might be any number of countries, but for the last several years has been Spain and France. The booty is shared between captain, crew and crown, all of whom (most especially the crown) are exempt from hanging for piracy, on account of the signature and seal. Without a Letter of Marque? Be hanged for a pirate.

You would have something to say about that, how doing anything in the King’s name seems an excuse to slip under every one of the Ten Commandments, because God-something-or-others-the-King, so says the King, and he may instruct his citizens to do all the manner of unChristian things, and still call himself a Christian.

The question of how the precious letter was lost is a matter of considerable under-stairs gossip. Who would lose such a thing? Mrs Fredericks is certain your father turned pirate, losing it deliberately so as to keep all the plunder between himself and his men. The man who brought the letter, she observed, was a most unsavoury type, and exactly the sort to be crewing a pirate ship rather than a more respectable vessel. Our current housemaid, Sarah (Mrs Read is forever dismissing housemaids), confesses herself to have no opinion at all on the matter, probably because she imagines that young women aren’t expected or even desired to have an opinion, and that if she were to go so far as adopting an opinion, if word got about, it would quash all interest from the young men (delivery boys and footboys mostly) who court her with rough-picked flowers from the fields behind Liquor Pond Street, and other forms of treacled attention. Adisa is circumspect. He wraps his words in boxes within boxes until no-one can tell what he means. I detect that he does not wish to offend Mrs Fredericks (with whom he has to work most closely) by disagreeing with her, but does not wish to join her in slandering his employer’s dead son. Eventually he says,

‘He was never the thieving sort.’

‘The rich do nothing but profit from others,’ says Mrs Fredericks. ‘So he bought a licence to thieve and then he lost it.

Adisa, who has a tray of silver cutlery to occupy his fingers, says to me quietly, ‘He was a good young man.’

Mrs Fredericks tuts and turns her back.

‘Serve him right that he lost it and gets treated the same as anyone else,’ she says, before furiously putting some carrots to the knife. ‘Some people will do anything for money.’

Adisa knows this. Adisa’s father was captured in his home country and sent to work in the colonies. The negro men were treated worse than the livestock on the ship, and given almost no space to lie down in, and no clean water, and not enough food, and so many of them died on the journey that the profit of the expedition was badly affected, but that this was all that was considered, the loss of profit, and not the loss of life. He has grown quiet, absorbed in polishing his own face off the back of a spoon. When Mrs Fredericks leaves us and the boiling carrots to go upstairs, I ask,

‘But did Captain Read become a pirate, just because he lost his letter?’

He looks at me oddly. I realise I should have used the words ‘my father.’ To correct myself, I ask,

‘Am I the son of a pirate?’

‘If he has no Letter of Marque,’ he says, ‘then yes, you are. And I am the son of a slave. But what our fathers are called by other men should not reflect on us. And a pirate is not the most terrible thing to be called. Especially since the ague has him, and he cannot be hanged, God rest his soul.’

‘Why?’

He grins. ‘Because he is already dead, Master Read.’

‘No, why is a pirate not the most terrible thing to be called?’

He lays down the shiny spoon and picks up a duller implement. He tells me that he and his father were slaves on a plantation until he was six years old. Pirates had run of the island and the capital was built around their pleasure. Thought there was drunkenness and what he calls ‘looseness with ladies’, there was also generosity. The pirates would buy a pipe of wine, place it in the street, and say everyone who passed must drink from it. Gold was so bountiful with them it might have been feathers or seashells. Many pirates were so giddy with it they would to rid themselves of it however they could. His father, waiting for his master outside a store, was handed the price of his family’s freedom by a pirate merry with drink. To the pirate it was merely an amusement.

‘He insisted my father must tell his master as soon as he came out of the store, and put the money straight into his hand, so that he could see the man’s face,’ says Adisa. ‘He thought it a terrific jest. But by that jest I am standing before you now. Polishing forks. In a very handsome jacket. A pirate is free to do as he pleases.’

‘But was he not already?’ I ask. Thinking how Captain Reed was born into this house with its rugs and its drapes, and had dinner every night with his mother at the walnut table.

‘I remember your father when he was a boy,’ says Adisa. ‘His mother would have him always in his best clothes, and he was not allowed to climb or run about. But boys like to do these things. The more you stop them, the more they want to do them. Sea is the place that people run away to, no? If they have been denied adventure, and seek it?

‘Girls like to do these things too, sometimes,’ I say.

Adisa roars with laughter.

‘Girls? No. Girls don’t run away to sea. Girls run away to get married.’

He finishes with the cutlery. Every piece is in its correct place.

But my place has changed. My asking so boldly for the sailor’s name — Ezekiel Broom, a name not easily lost — clattered through Mrs Read’s grief some sense of the steel in me which she recognised, wrongly, as the blood of a Read. If she doubted my provenance before, my insistence on a formal introduction made me her grandson. She reached an arm out, tendril-like, and called for me to come into it, to be contained by her grasp and by her whisper that I was her boy now, I was her boy. If she had fantasies that her son hatched another family in the New World, and would be gifting her with grandchildren just as soon as he reappeared, Ezekial Broom swept them away. A hard broom he was for her, a broom that tips the husks and dust of things over the step and into the cold. And a soft broom for me, that cozens a little mouse out of where it was born and allows it to run freely about the house.

Our mother takes your father’s death badly. He was the one thing that kept her respectable, and now she is, she bemoans, in danger of becoming some ragtag hen. Why would he go and get himself dead of ague! As if he has deliberately slighted her by doing so. Within two weeks she has sold her wedding ring, which brings welcome income while leaving room for the opportunity of more. I sense she would be shot of me too, were I not so profitable. Without a child in her lodgings, she might be more appealing to those who might be appealed to, but at the same time the crown she earns by loaning me twice a week to Mrs Read is a precious thing she would feel the loss of. Nevertheless I feel myself, in both education and influence, slipping almost imperceptibly from one household to the other.

Mrs Read calls me to her side more often, pats at her cushions, has me sit beside her. I wonder if all those cushions aren’t only to project her brittle bones from the hard surfaces around her (for her bones are as thin as sticks) but to shield her more generally from the harshness of a life in which she only obliquely participates. She will have me be the part of her that goes out into the world. I sense I am to have all the advantages of a Read, and slip my mother’s influence. And soon she asks my mother if I may stay with her some evenings, sleep and wake here. She will pay my mother no less in maintenance. My mother is surprisingly agreeable. Is there not greater chance of my discovery? Neither of us seem to believe so. In Mrs Read’s eyes I am so firmly her grandson now, that were she to walk in upon me bathing she would probably not see what I am missing.

Adisa is instructed to show me my sleeping quarters. In the entrance hall he pauses, very serious, and says,

‘Is it the truth you are Mrs Read’s grandson?’

He stares at me with not the smallest bit of give in his eyes. It is all I can do to say,

‘Why — why would you ask such a thing?’

‘We do not pay for the company of our grandchildren. We expect it. And we also give them pleasant rooms to sleep in, and not the coal shed.’

‘I am sleeping in the coal shed?’

He winks.

‘That is only what we call it. It is really very nice. It doesn’t even have a rat anymore. Only beetles.’

I watch his face: it stays very still, very earnest, his eyes looking into mine as though he is most concerned to be of help. And then he crumples into laughter.

‘You are my favourite boy,’ he says. ‘My very favourite boy. You are sleeping in the attic. You will like it. It is hot at this time of year, but not too cold in winter, because the chimney runs through it. You will like it.’

I keep looking at him to see if he will change his mind again, and when he sees that is what I am doing, he laughs even more. ‘Come, follow me,’ he says, going up the stairs.

I do as I’m told. He pauses on the landing outside Mrs Read’s bedroom and opens the other door on the same landing.

‘My room is in the attic. This is your room. It was your father’s.’ He gleans much amusement from my face. ‘We are going to have a fine time, together,’ he says. ‘We are going to be friends.’

But a few days later, in a fit of apoplexy after seeing your father’s name mentioned in a broadsheet, Mrs Read ups and dies.

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You Will Learn Nothing Good From Mister Dryden

I am not the only one not going by their name. Charles, the negro servant, corrects me the very first time we are alone. I have a question about the gloves but have no sooner begun with ‘Charles,’ then he stops me with a finger.

‘My name is not Charles,’ he says. ‘My name is Adisa.’

I might say my name is not Mark, to show him we are not so different, but if I told him my real name he would know we’re as different as cat and dog.

‘Adisa,’ he says again, as though my thinking was a kind of not listening.

I say it back to him, and though it is not a complicated name, I step over it uncertainly like an unlit path. He laughs.

‘Adisa,’ he repeats. ‘Remember it. Charles is my English name. Mrs Read gave it to me. There were two kings of that name I’m told, though I’m also told that the first had his head chopped off and the second was a fool who was thrown off the throne. So perhaps it is not a good name.’

‘I think it’s a good name,’ I say.

‘Adisa is a better name,’ he says. ‘It means One Who Makes His Meaning Clear. But you must call me Charles in front of Mrs Read.’

Is he a slave? Oh no, he says, he is a free man. He was a slave as a boy, but not now. He earns a wage with Mrs Read. He is saving, he says, tapping the side of his nose in a tradesman’s gesture. Saving, yes, in the hope he might one day afford a wife.

‘You would buy a wife?’

He barks a laugh. ‘No! No, you strange boy. Women must be kept though, they must be kept.’

Like horses? Like chickens? Wide eyed staring at him, I suppose, from the way he laughs again.

‘They have babies, you know. Wives will have babies when you marry them. They can’t be working then. So you have to work enough to keep all of you. You, you wife, and your babies too. That is how women cost, even when they have no price on them.’

Me thinking: that is how I would be enslaved.

But already I belong to Mrs Read.

She is conscious of how I reflect on her, with my country speech and common ways. Her son married down, and nothing to be done about that: many a clever young man’s made stupid by the tug of his loins. But no grandson of mine, she says, no grandson of mine, as though the person who grubbed about in Broxholme for eight years was another creature, and I have just now been born, entire, out of a flower, like a fairy boy in a story. No grandson of mine, knocking at my ears over and over with new rules that please or perplex me. No grandson of mine will be torn-trousered, or go unbreakfasted, no grandson of mine will ask for the sugar bowl in that manner. She is writing my future, too. No grandson of mine will go off fighting other people’s wars, no matter how noble it might be to fight for king and country. No grandson of mine will do anything that wastes their mind. They will find an occupation that keeps them safely in London. No grandson of mine will go uneducated.

These are the words that conjure Mister Cedric Rotard. Mister Rotard has the appearance of a spindle that has lost the best part of its wool. The strain of being a tutor has rubbed him threadbare ever since he left what he calls ‘my alma mater’, which he told me curtly is not his mother but something called a university, which he speaks of in a crushed voice, as though it really were his mother, and had loved him the way mothers are meant to do, but had unexpectedly turned on him and thrown him out on his bare arse-bones. I have the strongest feeling he would have stayed there had he been able, so he didn’t have to teach little toe rags (which I heard him call me to Adisa) their alphabets. After a year of Wednesdays, we are well beyond the alphabet, and he is trying to do what he calls extending my vocabulary, perhaps so that I can understand better what he is saying to me, because many of his words are a lot longer than the words I have been used to, and have their roots in Latin, which he also says he will teach me. I ask him where they speak Latin, and he says ‘Nowhere but where gentlemen mingle’ which he seems to think a very fine quality. I ask him if there are no countries where they speak Latin and he answers, ‘Not one,’ looking as pleased if Mrs Frederick the housekeeper has brought him a slice of her honey cake, and I say, then I won’t learn it, but might he please learn me French, and he says ‘will you’ and ‘teach me’ and ‘No’. He is confusing to me and confused himself, more often than is safe for someone somewhere as busy as London, and is more likely to remember a line of poetry from a man in a powdered wig than he is to remember where he is in a sentence, or where his spectacles are, or that a respectable man is required to tuck his shirt into his trousers.

He is fond of switching me with his rule whenever I fail to meet his measure of me. One time, when I am making an error, he swats the back of my hand so hard that I am surprised into the moment of his death. Crossing a road with his eyes concerned in a letter, he mis-steps on a wet cobble and all his long body collapses like a pile of soft fruit, under the iron-rimmed wheels of a dray cart. I see his pince-nez — the same set he peers through at me daily — crushed into bitter jewels on the cobbles, the purple snake of his blood, the half-read letter released from a stricken hand. Not so many years away, from his uncreased brow and his same-style jacket. Returning to the sunlit dust of the room, the pine desk, and my stinging hand paralysed on the paper, I hold my eyes to his very firmly, as though I can stick him to the present moment. A moment in which — I observe — he sighs a breath out of his nose and tsks his tongue against his teeth. His eyes grow aghast to be gazed upon.

‘What, boy?’

‘Never read out of doors,’ I say.

To which he says nothing, but turns and walks to the window, shivering across his shoulders.

Mister Rotard thinks very fondly of Mister Dryden, our national poet, and will quote him at the smallest provocation. The sight of a polished apple in a bowl on the dining table, for example, provokes him to stand very still, as though afraid to lose his balance, and then throw his arm towards the curtain as though it were about to draw back to reveal an audience, and recite a small verse. So compelling is his action that I look to the curtain for a hidden listener, but there is nothing there but a dead bumblebee lying below, which must have given up on the French windows ever being opened again because Mrs Read has been reading about the dangers of breathing in fog. It has been foggy for three days. But Mister Rotard cares not a fig about fog. Mister Rotard only cares about the mother university and Mister Dryden. I think Mister Dryden a horrible prig but cannot say so, for the certainty that it would lead Mister Rotard to cuff me round the ear. He is in the habit of cuffing me round the ear whenever he imagines I am not listening or have not heard him. Which is often, because rarely do I understand what he is saying when he recites poetry, and when I do understand, I do not like it. This is the verse which the apple prompted him to perform to the curtain:

‘A woman’s counsel brought us first to woe,

And made her man his paradise forego,

Where at heart’s ease he liv’d; and might have been

As free from sorrow as he was from sin.’

It is from a poem called ‘The Cock and the Fox’. He tells me Mister Dryden claims the words to be those of the cock Chanticleer, which is a fine trick when it gives licence to other cocks to crow them across English parlours. Mister Rotard has said this verse at me half a dozen times now, as if expecting me to agree heartily, because I am a young man, and therefore should imagine that women are to blame for everything. Whereas being a girl, and knowing what I know about my own making, and how that drove Ma to gin, and her husband to flee back to the sea, I might be inclined to throw some blame the other way. But wickedness does not reside only in one sex, and goodness does not choose its host by their reproductive organs. You schooled me early on that what the Church preaches to us is lies, and there to keep us bent low, scrubbing steps and hauling coal, or bowing and curtseying to their lord and ladyships. Eve’s ruin of Adam, for which womankind are punished forever with the curse of monthly pain and deathly childbearing, is one of the worst of those lies.

Mister Rotard likes to pronounce things about Man, and Man is meant to mean all of us, though clearly it only means men. Man has direction and purpose whereas woman has none, and not even a capital letter. Man must make things in the world — strides, his mark, waves — but woman can only make things in the house and only things of no consequence.

Yet the knowledge that Mister Rotard bestows upon me is a gift. The means by which I may sign my name, and read what I am signing it to, and read almost any book in Mrs Read’s dead husband’s study, is a gift usually given only to those with extra meat between the legs. The small bulge where my pizzle should be is only a balled up stocking. But with this simple trick and a face that might be either sex or none, I am now equipped to read what the world has to tell me.

Education takes up the whole of Wednesdays, but your grandfather’s library is mine on Sundays, so long as I have been well-behaved at the dinner table. Your grandfather was a merchant trader. His study is filled with the accounts of travellers and seafarers. And there are maps. I stare at them: the strange names, the inky outlines of shorelines. I feel for a sense of you in any of them: the quickening of knowledge, this old kind of knowledge that has always been mine without trying. I ask which bay, which island, which port contains you. But I cannot empty myself to receive the answer. It is only questions, more questions, a fury of questions, filling up my head like brine in drowning lungs.

Three summers go by. My thumb and two fingers are stained black at their tips, as though rotten with writing. When first I began my twice-weekly visits, Mrs Read was concerned that I was not tall enough. She said I must eat more chard, because ‘chard makes long bones’. So I ate more chard. Always chard on Sundays when she could get hold of it. After three years she is concerned I am too tall. Far too tall for my age, surely. No more chard, and less sunlight. She barters an extra day a week out of my mother. The country is fevered with talk of war and this worries her. Boys have such a tendency to be romantic about war, and what of their mothers and what of their grandmothers, and what of the poor dear girls who might have had husbands. I am not to imagine she will ever buy me a commission.

‘That is a thing that will not happen,’ she says. ‘There will be no more calamities.’

But no amount of money gives a person freedom from that.

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The Truth is Mostly Invented

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Some of them have existed as men.

Infamous 18^th-century pirate Mary Read tells of her previous life as a soldier and wife in this powerful novel by the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers.

Contents

Port Royal, Jamaica. 18 November 1720.

BOOK 1.

Broxholme, Devon. 1696-97.

London, England. 1697-1705.

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